Tag: China

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general freedom international affairs

June 4: Tiananmen 32

China, protests, freedom, democracy

Will truth ever be bought-​off or beaten-​down enough to satisfy Chinese President Xi Jinping and the Butchers of Beijing?

The ‘Butchers’ nickname came 32 years ago today — from the clearing of Tiananmen Square by soldiers and tanks in the early morning hours of June 4th, and in opening fire on and murdering thousands of Chinese citizens outside the square. 

Someone may object that Xi, the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) since 2012, can’t be blamed. He wasn’t in charge back in 1989.

Xi didn’t give the order for troops to kill the unarmed students and workers who filled Tiananmen Square for weeks with as many as a million people protesting for freedom and democracy. Nor did he have thousands more arrested and imprisoned after the massacre. In fact, Xi’s father “condemned the use of force against protesters during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests,” informs U.S. News. 

But Xi cannot escape the taint of Tiananmen. Not only does Human Rights Watch charge that government repression under his unlimited rule is “at its worst level since the Tiananmen Square massacre,” Xi and today’s CCP are on a mission to memory-​hole Tiananmen. 

How? 

By massacring any public memorial of the massacre.

While the truth about Tiananmen has always been verboten in China, freer folks in Hong Kong held massive memorials each year. “Last year’s vigil was banned for the first time because of the coronavirus,” Yahoo News explains, “but thousands defied police and rallied anyway.”

This year, however, the new national security law threatens five years in prison for attending an unauthorized rally. Chanting “Democracy for China!” could land a Hongkonger in prison for life.*

Thankfully, in America today we have the freedom to condemn the Chinazis. 

And remember June 4. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* And it has already begun: “Hong Kong cracks down on Tiananmen commemorations, arrests vigil organiser.”

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international affairs social media

The YouTubification of China

China, YouTube, censorship

The speech-​repressing Chinese government and the speech-​repressing tech firm Google are apparently taking cues from each other.

Busy Google unit YouTube has been working overtime to cripple the YouTube channel China Uncensored, which is too brutal in its criticism of the Chinazi government.

YouTube has demonetized the channel’s latest video, “YouTube Helps Cover Up China’s Atrocities.” According to channel publisher America Uncovered LLC, the videos that tend to get penalized are those with footage “that makes the Communist Party look bad.”

Google often does much more to repress speech than flag and demonetize. But Google doesn’t want to always be super-​blatant. So China Uncensored is still a YouTube channel. For now.

In contrast, the Chinese government usually goes full Chinazi. Its latest project is a snitch app to help neighbors turn in neighbors for voicing “wrong” opinions.

It’s about correcting misinformation. China’s Cyberspace Administration says the app will help counter online statements that are “maliciously distorting, slandering and denying Party, national and military history in an attempt to confuse people’s thinking,”

Ah, disagreement, a.k.a. “misinformation,” the too-​steep cost of freedom! And who alone is qualified to determine which information is correct?

“Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth,” says Orwell’s O’Brien. “It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party.”

Deviate from the party line about the party, the pandemic, an election, lack of elections, or anything else, and supposedly it’s right and just to muzzle you.

Wrong.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Photo by Jackie

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Two Strikes and You’re Out, MLB

baseball, China

Major League Baseball has renewed its contract with a Chinese telecommunications company with ties to the Chinese Communist Party.

Professional baseball thus avoids the fate of the National Basketball Association, ejected from Chinese airwaves for a year after Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey voiced support for pro-​democracy protests in Hong Kong.

This doesn’t mean that the folks running MLB lack a moral compass.

It could be just a skewed one.

One day after Chinese state media confirmed that American baseball games would continue to be shown on Tencent’s streaming platform, MLB yanked its All-​Star game from Atlanta, Georgia. The idea? To protest the state’s new election reform.

Baseball Commissioner Robert Manfred would have us believe that demonstrating “our values as a sport” requires 

  1. cutting deals with the tyrannical and murderous government of China while simultaneously 
  2. noisily punishing Georgia because friends of slack voting rules dislike the voter ID requirements and other provisions of Georgia’s new election law designed to limit the potential for fraud.

MLB’s press release does not bother to explain what is wrong with the law except to say that the league “opposes restrictions to the ballot box.” 

All restrictions?

MLB officials ignored the Epoch Times’s inquiry about “how continuing business with China demonstrates its values considering the recent U.S. recognition of a genocide being carried out by the CCP against the Uyghur Muslims.”

Hmm. Chinazi dictatorship or Georgia election reform: Which is worse? 

I guess for those with a skewed moral compass, that’s a tough one.

But for the rest of us the question answers itself.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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media and media people national politics & policies responsibility

Lab Rats III: Doubling Down on Danger

Covid, China, Wuhan, virus

Ten months ago, I commented on a Newsweek article informing that “the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the organization led by Dr. [Anthony] Fauci, funded scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and other institutions for work on gain-​of-​function research on bat coronaviruses.”

A deadly worldwide pandemic along with possibly explosive implications as to its origin, notwithstanding, the story went nowhere. 

Last week, I highlighted new evidence that aligns with the lab transmission theory pooh-​poohed in the World Health Organization report, which was quickly discredited — including by the WHO Director-General.

Yesterday, I went further into the cover-​up, and how the “conspiracy theorist” charge has been used by the confreres of the Wuhan scientists to dissuade anyone from looking in the direction of the dangerous research that had been conducted there. 

Josh Rogin’s Washington Post column gives greater context to the need to investigate the theory, expressed by Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control under President Trump, that SARS-​CoV‑2 was transmitted to humans accidentally through a Wuhan lab:

“Richard H. Ebright, a Rutgers University microbiologist and biosafety expert … said the entire genre of research Redfield was referring to, known as gain-​of-​function research (in which viruses are captured from the wild and developed in lab settings to make them more dangerous), needs to be thoroughly reexamined.” 

Worse? “The world’s current plan to respond to the pandemic entails a huge expansion of precisely this type of research,” Rogin explains. “The $200 million program meant to ‘predict’ virus outbreaks is set to grow into a $1.2 billion Global Virome Project …”

“The plan is,” Ebright told Rogin, “having failed to predict and preempt and having possibly triggered the current pandemic, to increase the scale six times.”

Emphasis added because, well, can it be emphasized enough?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Earlier in this Series:

12 Monkeys in Charge

June 18, 2020 

Twelve Monkeys in Charge?

Lab Rats

March 31, 2021

Lab Rats

Lab Rats II: The Conspiracy

April 6, 2021

Lab Rats II: The Conspiracy

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The Virus Is Power

Covid, China, Democrats

Remember how fast the pandemic scare went partisan? At first Democrats downplayed the contagion … because President Trump was up-playing it. Then they switched sides when they saw that they could out-​over-​play it, it being easy to “out-​empathy” Trump.

Masks went from being officially deprecated to officially required.

The lockdowns and extreme “social distancing” were instituted on the Trump/​Fauci team’s recommendation to “flatten the curve,” but after the allotted time and many hospitals suffering a serious lack of patients, the lockdowns continued in most states.

Despite a complete change of rationale.

The working notion appeared to be: keep deaths down and panic up … and wait for a vaccine.

Which Trump promised, and, well, rushed and pushed past the regulators.

Now, there exist substantial hurdles to fast-​tracking a medicine, even in an emergency. But the Democrats’ early resistance to Trump’s talk of HCQ as a successful COVID counter-​measure turned out to serve as an excuse to push vaccination, for had treatments using HCQ and similar existing medicines been normalized, the emergency authorization would have been ruled out of bounds.

And the goal of universal vaccination scuttled. 

So where are we now? 

In America, there are two basic approaches: mRNA gene “therapy” and a modified adenovirus, both focusing on the spiked protein of the SARS-​CoV‑2 virus with the aim of jump-​starting immune response.

And after the vaccines? The mandates. J.D. Tuccille, at Reason, covers this latest development — which a year ago was called a “conspiracy theory.” The Biden administration and major corporations are now developing “vaccination passports” that would continue the lockdowns for those who have not been vaccinated. 

And China may want in on that action.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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initiative, referendum, and recall

Shanghaied in Tallahassee

initiative, petition, Florida

How to prevent citizen control of government?

The democracy-​loathing Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is not merely wiping out Hong Kong’s civil liberties, but also aggressively undercutting the limited democratic input citizens previously had. You see, in December of 2019, in the last local elections before the pandemic proscribed the city’s protest movement, fledgling pro-​democracy candidates won an incredible 87 percent of the seats. 

So the Chinazis postponed the next election, just to be safe.*

Never a full-​fledged one-​person/​one-​vote democracy, Hongkongers only voted for 35 of the 70 Legislative Council seats. But now the CCP is increasing legislative seats to 90 while reducing to just 20 those that voters choose.**

While tyranny may seem another growth industry where China outpaces us, don’t count out our politicians just yet.

Last November, Florida voters decided four citizen initiatives, passing two and defeating two others — including one to make it tougher to pass constitutional amendments. Such “direct democracy” isn’t easy — almost 900,000 Sunshine State voters must sign. Then to pass, Florida amendments require a 60-​percent vote.

Yet for the third consecutive session the unfriendly Florida Legislature, dominated by Republicans, wants to make it even more difficult for regular people to communicate, associate, organize and petition an amendment onto the ballot, bypassing the pols:

♦ House Joint Resolution 61 would hike that 60-​percent supermajority for passage to 66.7‑percent. Should a measure that receives 66.5 percent of the vote lose? 

♦ Senate Bill 1890 would outlaw contributions of greater than $3,000 to the petition phase of the campaign, which usually costs upwards of $5 million. It’s campaign finance “reform” specifically designed to silence citizens by blocking their ability to successfully place an issue before fellow voters.

“[I]t should not be an impossible process,” offered Trish Neely with the League of Women Voters …

… of Florida, that is. Not Hong Kong.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Not to mention the police arresting aspiring pro-​democracy candidates.

** The police must now first approve all candidates as being sufficiently pro-​China, as well.

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Photo by Elizabeth Jenkins

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